Natural History (Pliny)
The Natural History is a Latin work by Pliny the Elder. The largest single work to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day, the Natural History compiles information gleaned from other ancient authors. Despite the work's title, its subject area is not limited to what is today understood by natural history; Pliny himself defines his scope as "the natural world, or life". It is encyclopaedic in scope, but its structure is not like that of a modern encyclopaedia. It is the only work by Pliny to have survived, and the last that he published. He published the first 10 books in AD 77, but had not made a final revision of the remainder at the time of his death during the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius. The rest was published posthumously by Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger.
The work is divided into 37 books, organised into 10 volumes. These cover topics including astronomy, mathematics, geography, ethnography, anthropology, human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, horticulture, pharmacology, mining, mineralogy, sculpture, art, and precious stones.
Pliny's Natural History became a model for later encyclopaedias and scholarly works as a result of its breadth of subject matter, its referencing of original authors, and its index.
Overview
Pliny's Natural History was written alongside other substantial works. Pliny combined his scholarly activities with a busy career as an imperial administrator for the emperor Vespasian. Much of his writing was done at night; daytime hours were spent working for the emperor, as he explains in the dedicatory preface addressed to Vespasian's elder son, the future emperor Titus, with whom he had served in the army. As for the nocturnal hours spent writing, these were seen not as a loss of sleep but as an addition to life, for as he states in the preface, Vita vigilia est, "to be alive is to be watchful", in a military metaphor of a sentry keeping watch in the night. Pliny claims to be the only Roman ever to have undertaken such a work, in his prayer for the blessing of the universal mother:The Natural History is encyclopaedic in scope, but its format is unlike a modern encyclopaedia. However, it does have structure: Pliny uses Aristotle's division of nature to recreate the natural world in literary form. Rather than presenting compartmentalised, stand-alone entries arranged alphabetically, Pliny's ordered natural landscape is a coherent whole, offering the reader a guided tour: "a brief excursion under our direction among the whole of the works of nature ..." The work is unified but varied: "My subject is the world of nature ... or in other words, life," he tells Titus.
File:Schedel'sche Weltchronik-Dog head.jpg|thumb|left|A cynocephalus, or dog-head, as described by Pliny in his Natural History. From the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Nature for Pliny was divine, a pantheistic concept inspired by the Stoic philosophy, which underlies much of his thought, but the deity in question was a goddess whose main purpose was to serve the human race: "nature, that is life" is human life in a natural landscape. After an initial survey of cosmology and geography, Pliny starts his treatment of animals with the human race, "for whose sake great Nature appears to have created all other things". This teleological view of nature was common in antiquity and is crucial to the understanding of the Natural History. The components of nature are not just described in and for themselves, but also with a view to their role in human life. Pliny devotes a number of the books to plants, with a focus on their medicinal value; the books on minerals include descriptions of their uses in architecture, sculpture, art, and jewellery. Pliny's premise is distinct from modern ecological theories, reflecting the prevailing sentiment of his time.
File:Nuremberg chronicles - Strange People - Umbrella Foot.jpg|thumb|A sciapod, described by Pliny in his Natural History, from the Nuremberg Chronicle
Pliny's work frequently reflects Rome's imperial expansion, which brought new and exciting things to the capital: exotic eastern spices, strange animals to be put on display or herded into the arena, even the alleged phoenix sent to the emperor Claudius in AD 47 – although, as Pliny admits, this was generally acknowledged to be a fake. Pliny repeated Aristotle's maxim that Africa was always producing something new. Nature's variety and versatility were claimed to be infinite: "When I have observed nature she has always induced me to deem no statement about her incredible." This led Pliny to recount rumours of strange peoples on the edges of the world. These monstrous races – the Cynocephali or Dog-Heads, the Sciapodae, whose single foot could act as a sunshade, the mouthless Astomi, who lived on scents – were not strictly new. They had been mentioned in the fifth century BC by Greek historian Herodotus, but Pliny made them better known.
"As full of variety as nature itself", stated Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger, and this verdict largely explains the appeal of the Natural History since Pliny's death in the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79. Pliny had gone to investigate the strange cloud – "shaped like an umbrella pine", according to his nephew – rising from the mountain.
The Natural History was one of the first ancient European texts to be printed, in Venice in 1469. Philemon Holland's English translation of 1601 has influenced literature ever since.
Structure
The Natural History consists of 37 books. Pliny devised a summarium, or list of contents, at the beginning of the work that was later interpreted by modern printers as a table of contents. The table below is a summary based on modern names for topics.| Volume | Books | Contents |
| I | 1 | Preface and list of contents, lists of authorities |
| I | 2 | Astronomy, meteorology |
| II | 3–6 | Geography and ethnography |
| II | 7 | Anthropology and human physiology |
| III | 8–11 | Zoology, including mammals, snakes, marine animals, birds, insects |
| IV–VII | 12–27 | Botany, including agriculture, horticulture, especially of the vine and olive, medicine |
| VIII | 28–32 | Pharmacology, magic, water, aquatic life |
| IX–X | 33–37 | Mining and mineralogy, especially as applied to life and art, work in gold and silver, statuary in bronze, art, modelling, sculpture in marble, precious stones and gems |
Production
Purpose
Pliny's purpose in writing the Natural History was to cover all learning and art so far as they are connected with nature or draw their materials from nature. He says:Working method
His nephew, Pliny the Younger, described the method that Pliny used to write the Natural History:Pliny the Younger told the following anecdote illustrating his uncle's enthusiasm for study:
Style
Pliny's writing style emulates that of Seneca. It aims less at clarity and vividness than at epigrammatic point. It contains many antitheses, questions, exclamations, tropes, metaphors, and other mannerisms of the Silver Age. His sentence structure is often loose and straggling. There is heavy use of the ablative absolute, and ablative phrases are often appended in a kind of vague "apposition" to express the author's own opinion of an immediately previous statement, e.g.,| First half: description | Second half: Pliny's opinion | |
| Pliny | dixit ... uno se praestare, quod manum de tabula sciret tollere, | memorabili praecepto nocere saepe nimiam diligentiam. |
| Grammar | Active sentence | Ablative absolute phrase |
| Translation | In one thing Apelles stood out, namely, knowing when he had put enough work into a painting, | a salutary warning that too much effort can be counterproductive. |
Publication history
First publication
Pliny wrote the first ten books in AD 77, and was engaged on revising the rest during the two remaining years of his life. The work was probably published with little revision by the author's nephew Pliny the Younger, who, when telling the story of a tame dolphin and describing the floating islands of the Vadimonian Lake thirty years later, has apparently forgotten that both are to be found in his uncle's work. He describes the Naturalis Historia as a Naturae historia and characterises it as a "work that is learned and full of matter, and as varied as nature herself."The absence of the author's final revision may explain many errors, including why the text is as John Healy writes "disjointed, discontinuous and not in a logical order"; and as early as 1350, Petrarch complained about the corrupt state of the text, referring to copying errors made between the ninth and eleventh centuries.
Manuscripts
About the middle of the 3rd century, an abstract of the geographical portions of Pliny's work was produced by Solinus. Early in the 8th century, Bede, who admired Pliny's work, had access to a partial manuscript which he used in his "De natura rerum", especially the sections on meteorology and gems. However, Bede updated and corrected Pliny on the tides.In total there are some 307 extant medieval manuscripts of the work, however this was narrowed down to just 17 for work on the critical edition by Detlefsen. Olsen published details of all of Pliny's manuscripts pre-1200, however did not attempt to reconstruct the stemma.
In 1141 Robert of Cricklade wrote the Defloratio Historiae Naturalis Plinii Secundi consisting of nine books of selections taken from an ancient manuscript.
There are three independent classes of the stemma of the surviving Historia Naturalis manuscripts. These are divided into:
- Late Antique Codicies: 5th–6th centuries. None survive intact; all as palimpsests or as recycled book bindings.
- Vetustiores : 8th–9th centuries
- Recentiores : 9th century. From these descend all known later medieval recensions from the 11th–12th centuries up to 1469 printed edition.